Nurse the Hate: The Madness of King Trump

I woke up on Tuesday morning with the slight disappointment I didn’t die in my sleep.  I laid on my back and scanned my brain to remember why I felt slightly hungover until I realized I wasn’t hungover.  This slightly sick feeling might just be a new “normal” for mornings.  Super.  I tried to think about the various small tasks that I had to accomplish during the day and weighed that against my desire for accomplishing these tasks.  With less desire than necessary for action, I remained motionless.  I decided to look at my email to see if anything disastrous had happened while I was sleeping and then check the headlines on my phone.  This woke me up.

It seems very odd how quickly we as a nation have gotten used to our president sending out crazy tweets.  We are the same nation that got worked up about if Obama was showing enough dignity for the office because he tossed a football with his sleeves rolled up.  The nation was paralyzed for two years when Bill Clinton got blown by an intern.  He even got impeached for that.  Yet, in one 24 hour time span our president wanted to have an IQ challenge with his Secretary of State, insulted an ESPN anchor, called a leading Republican Senator “Liddle” making fun of his height when that official noted concern for the lack of competency from the office, and picked a fight with NFL owners over taxes.  It didn’t even make a ripple.  Each one of these things would have been considered insane a year ago.  Not any longer.  It is another “new normal”.

One of the things I know about is the NFL.  I have worked on the peripheral of the league for two stints which has led to “behind the rope” access.  One of the things I know about the league is that the billionaire owners of the teams do not like to be challenged.  What they like even less is someone trying to get in their pocket.  Despite Puerto Rico, Houston, Florida, California wildfires, health care reform, North Korea, Iran, immigration, terrorism, and taxes all being front and center, our President has decided to focus on NFL players kneeling in protest during the anthem and an ESPN anchor that sided with the players.  He wants to bully NFL owners into making black players stand for the anthem.  That is who our nation elected to run the country and set our agenda.

 

Having had this limited experience with the NFL, I can tell you this.  The players are not the kind of men that back down from challenges.  They are violent borderline psychos that don’t back down from bullies.  The owners, unbelievably wealthy power brokers that kept Trump from getting into the league years ago, are not going to be goaded into a bad PR fight with the president.  So now, with no real upside, Trump has decided to fight with everyone and anyone associated with the league over a stupid symbolic gesture designed to focus on equal treatment from law enforcement, something in theory our highest office should agree with in principle.

 

Trump is now creating a much larger scenario with the players and owners than is necessary.  It will lead to further protests and bad feelings not just from players but across the population.  The owners, who are furious anyone is messing with their money, will be very actively working against Trump behind closed doors with their considerable influence.  If I was Trump, what I would have done is said “Respect for our flag is very important, but so is the right to free speech.  Let’s get both sides together on this issue and find common ground.”  This enables the players to save face and point to potential results, allows everyone an out to speak for how much they love the good old USA, and all pose for pictures afterwards while shaking hands.  I came to this simple conclusion because I am not, to use the parlance of the day, “a moron”.

This leads me to think about things I don’t know that much about like Iran and North Korea.  My thought is that if Trump doesn’t know how to deal with something like a simple NFL protest and makes it worse, how can he be expected not to lead us into World War 3 around the globe?  It is unreasonable to expect him to be able to handle ANY of these situations he faces because he is “a moron”.  This conclusion is coming from Rex Tillerson, a man that deals with him daily.  It comes from a leading Republican Senator, who is theoretically rooting for Trump to succeed.  Most of all, it comes from common sense.  Look, I don’t want to live through End Times.  I know we all have sort of got used to this craziness, and maybe sort of convinced ourselves it won’t touch us.  It’s easier to ignore it.  I get it.  But I’m screaming from the rooftops here.  

 Can someone in power do something?  Anything?